A few weeks ago, I noticed it for the first time. Cleaning up after seemed the most natural thing to do. But then it happened again. And again. And again. Now I’ve lost count. And stopped cleaning up. Someone else does it, I am sure. I am talking about black ants in our refrigerator! A thin trail of black, next to the door, not near any item of food, barely visible until you crouch down to retrieve an item. Sounds gross, right? I was more intrigued. I wondered where they were coming from and where they were going to! Think I’ve found an explanation? No, not yet. Think I’ve tried researching it? Of course.

Ants are cold blooded – which means they cannot alter or adjust their body’s temperature as per the chill on the outside. They’d rather go sunning outside to warm themselves up than enter a refrigerator. And Bangalore has been cold for a while now. Not snowy cold, but I think a blanket would be cozy, cold.

So we’re dealing with three questions here :

Why were the ants attracted to the refrigerator?

How did the ants enter the refrigerator?

Why did other ants follow?

Here comes my dissection! Feel free to tell me where I am wrong.

Why were the ants attracted to the refrigerator?

This one’s simple! Food. It’s always about a hungry stomach making you do irrational stuff – well that and greed, jealousy, fear and passion too. But let’s stick to a hungry stomach right now. The refrigerator didn’t contain anything sweet. Well, at least not sugar containing sweets. I don’t suppose natural sugar in raw fruits count, do they? Maybe they do.

2. How did the ants enter the refrigerator?

Mother says there could be a crack in the stand. Internet says the seal could be broken. Maybe this also explains why the refrigerator has not been working well – it doesn’t seem to be containing the chill inside or sometimes becomes too chilled. I should probably tell the repair guy the next time he’s around – that it’s not a complicated random machine name issue, but a sealant issue.

3. Why did other ants follow?

The ants obviously did not survive the chill because they’re not warm blooded. Well I am assuming because I didn’t check their pulse before cleaning them away! But it doesn’t add up somewhere. Maybe some survived.

I’ll explain why I think some survived the refrigerator and went back home, with food. Ants don’t communicate with words, nor do they have milestones or directions for home laid out on Google Maps. So how do they not get lost? Ants secrete pheromones into the air, which are like hormones but just outside the body and affects others who recognize it. So ants leave a trail of home-finding pheromone when they go out looking for food, which is their Google map when they have to return home. Just involves a lot of sniffing, I guess. Now if theirs is a triumphant return home, they leave a food trail pheromone, which other ants at home can now follow to get to the source of food. So there had to be cases of survival which would lead the other ants to the refrigerator, albeit a source of food, laced with cold and a hint of death. So much for me storing my food there!

And that’s my fun fact of the day! A long one, indeed.

Signing off,

Graciously Yours!

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I was probably in school when I first heard of Ted talks from a relative. I didn’t pay much attention, after all you only retain about 20% of what you hear. (Research says so, not me. I’d peg it down to even much lower, considering how my requests at a certain workplace almost always fall on deaf ears.) I heard of a Ted talk next when I had to deal with understanding how a brain stroke had affected my father. After that, it felt like I was possessed. A window into a new realm had opened up for me. I could hear people talk about their experiences, learning, conventional thoughts, unconventional theories, the changes they’d made around them, the changes they’d undergone in themselves.

Two years ago, I attended my first TedX conference and it left me inspired for a couple of months, itching to do something different with my life. After that I started writing regularly, trying to be better at the one thing I enjoyed doing most – writing! Today, I am working on the last edits of my novel and look at the timing! Tomorrow I am attending my second TedX conference. The venue is the same, the organisers same but everything else’s changed. I am so much closer to realising my dream, my book might see the light of the day in just a few more weeks, or maybe months! Who knows? But I know it’ll happen. It has to.

Last week, A and I attended the TedX adventures lined up pre-event. A workshop on RJing and another on acting. Such eye-openers they were. Or if I were to be honest, they simply confirmed my suspicions! I’ve always loved the radio. It has been a constant for the past years in my life, through new stations, new RJs, even new cities. I have always admired the quips my favorite RJ comes up with but in the workshop I understood the creativity and work that goes on behind it, exciting to say the least! He needs to be making a point each time he’s on air and that is a tough ask. Considering how well, he does it, leaves me all the more impressed.

Oh and the acting workshop! Oh my! A has always been interested in movies and acting so it was meant to be the one for him. But me? Oh I can do the amateur dramatics required for April Fools and emotional blackmails but emoting on cue? I suck at it! There was a point when the mentor was pushing me to be angry and I tried so hard that I ended up laughing. A was standing across the hall from me and he later told me my face was blank at that instant, in place of anger. But people who’ve seen me angry know that it shows on my face. Just not on cue. After my two seconds of embarrassment, even the mentor realized he’d better spend time working on others. And I will only say this once, but maybe I should stop calling out which of the Bollywood stars can act and can’t. They sure do a better job than I would have.

I guess I could always write the scripts for the actors. Someone needs to do that too, eh!

I am angry. Seething with anger, if I may so until I go on to the next news piece which arouses the same emotion in me. This probably has something to do with the click bait theories and algorithms being run by all social media outlets and even news agencies these days – all that they wish to do is get a response from us, mostly in the form of outrage, or surprise, or any sort of reaction. So here goes mine.

I understand not celebrating Valentine’s Day. A lot of people consider it a commercial gimmick, which it is, and they do not want to succumb to it. There are others who call out a day of love as unnecessarily famed, because they treat all days with love. Then there will be people who think a Western concept has no place to hold in a country like India, a concoction of cultures in itself. What I don’t understand is marrying a dog to a goat as a mark of protest against V-day?! What on Earth were you thinking? And this was not a thought which crossed across only one person’s mind. There were several others who agreed with the perpetrator of the idea and that led to a group protest, a mass protest more like.

What’s more – the media reported it, social media sites lapped it up and then like every action has an equal and opposite reaction, there came a protest group protesting against these protesters and filed a divorce petition for the marriage of A DOG AND A GOAT!!!

I am not even making this up. I don’t think I am this creative! I am just stating the facts as reported in the news.

My questions, the ones just off the mind would be – was the marriage even registered in the first place? And who really married them? And as per Hindu rituals, Islam or Christianity? And who’s going to be hearing the petition and awarding a divorce?

Also, did anyone care to ask the Dog and Goat if they want a divorce, because we in India sure as hell don’t ask if they wanted to get married!

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My eyes are paining from the long hours of research on the laptop. The pain in my back has aggravated. As I close my eyes and lull myself into sleep, I can feel your arm around me, snaking its way through the blanket onto my shoulders. I open my eyes but there’s no one beside me. I miss you. My heart does and today the mind does too, I guess. I check my phone again to see if I missed any of your calls. You are still at work or you’d have called. I hope you’ve eaten; I drop a text seeing no harm in reminding you once. I turn and shift to right side and close my eyes again, wishing sleep would come soon. I was tired but you must be more so. You’d been working long hours recently, barely managing to catch up on time to eat or even sleep properly.

My phone rings once. It’s you! Before I can take the call, you’ve disconnected and dropped a text. Maybe you thought I’d slept already. “On my way back. Will eat at home.” I sit up excitedly, forgetting about my back pain. I grimace in pain. As I stare at the wallpaper of my phone, of a holiday last year, both of us at the beach, I’m at ease. I walk out to the kitchen and put your food into glass bowls for reheating in the microwave. I sit by the sofa, lights flipped on, just in case the darkness makes me doze off. The clock ticks by and I wait for you to be back home. I think about the past when I’d snorted at the practice of a lot of Indian women eating only after their husbands had. I hadn’t realized that what might have started out as a traditional practice in reverence of their husbands, could also be a form for love for many. I silently laughed at being thick headed enough for having judged them.

The lock clicked as you slid the keys in them. I could see you, oh how tired you looked! But you hadn’t seen me yet. You took off your shoes, turned and laid eyes on me. You were surprised, all your tiredness washed away in that instance. That smile; the smile that lit up your face and crinkled your eyes! I would stay up all nights if I could be the reason behind that smile, I thought as I walked up to you. Is that why they say love is blind?

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It happened! It was inevitable. Some day or the other I was bound to be in its clutches. Now I know when my friend says she’s zoned out or that she can’t put pen to paper.

I have the the writer’s block! I can’t seem to get to writing. But I wanted to take a break from taking a break at the blog now! So here I am blabbering about a blocked me. At least, you’d know I am still alive and well, which I am.

Anyone knows how to get rid of the writer’s block?

All help is appreciated!

Graciously Yours!

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The new year has begun quite rigorously, asking long working hours, immense mental push to meet deadlines and lack of proper sleep due to a cold that doesn’t seem to be in the mood to be jolly and just saunter off anytime soon. So the news is my resort to humour on such days. Hope you too find the below snippets (mostly from the past two days) hilarious enough to shake off the oncoming Monday morning blues.

In a world where most of the words spewed while describing humanity these days are intolerance and violence, this peaceful and definitely not frustration free method is fool proof to ensure lesser repeat offenders. Good job, Germans. You’re NOT repeating history.Ouch! Not for the man who, due to maybe a folly of mixing wrong foods together, could not control the movements of his bowel. But I uttered an ouch for that FBI agent who would have to prepare the documents for this case and ask *awkward* questions to our ‘suspect’ in concern. This one can’t be fun! Any FBI agent around who’d throw light on the case file?What is wrong with those thieves? How drunk were they? They drank the vodka and left that filthy looking *my apologies*, shiny and quite heavy bottle at a building site? I wonder why. 😛 And how drunk was the bar owner that they got such a bottle made in the first place?

This isn’t funny. It really isn’t. But it still is! I can’t stop laughing. Not that I do not wish well for anyone who might have inadvertently been injured or faced losses during this accident. But I want to see Kim’s face when he’d been delivered this news! Blistering Barnacles, Captain Haddock would have uttered!

BONUS!

Is this man FOR REAL?!

Graciously Yours!

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Inspired by a video John Green put up last week on his channel Vlogbrothers, where he lists out changes he would want to see in himself in the upcoming year, a public list where he recounts all that could have been better in 2017, I thought of inking my mandatory year end post on the same lines. What would I want to leave behind in 2017?

First things first, I want to leave behind my erratic schedules so that I get enough sleep and can finally work out on a regular basis! It requires so much determination and discipline to ensure that your sleeping pattern is not disturbed. Though I’ve had wild nights involving movie marathons, long talks varying from about love, belongingness, work, family and even food, lot of leg pulling, the day after is spent sleeping in bed with a headache and the week often seems dull.

Cut down on online shopping! Retail therapy might sound good but at the end of the day you forget to keep a tab of all that you’ve bought and shouldn’t have. Until I don’t wear all the new clothes I’ve bought in a while, I’m not spending a penny on another set of clothes. Unless, there’s a mind boggling sale on Marks and Spencers! But, no. Control, Adi, control! Anyone with me on this?

Social media too. It is such a drab on most days and Facebook has nothing on my timelines except “Tag your such and such friend” and short films endorsing brands I don’t even think I’ll ever put to use. Their algorithms have failed to do the one thing they were supposed to do – hold my attention.

Workout! I so need to let go of the irregularity of my workouts. My body has to every couple of months bear the pain of a new workout session that begins at my whims and fancies and ends in a couple of days, citing the same pain. Unfair. So unfair. So the choice is – either workout regularly, or not at all. What say?

Oh but what is that one thing, apart from super awesome family and friends, that I would like to not leave back in 2017 at all?

My WRITING! This year has been extremely successful when it comes to writing and this is when I choose to tell you all that I have almost completed the manuscript of my novel and any day now I will request you to please help me with publishers! Be ready!

And meanwhile, welcome the new year with a smile, hoping it’ll harbour better times for all of us. Except, maybe Trump. Because his better would be worse for a lot of us. You too, Kim Jong.

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Nose squashed against the glass, the nine year old saw the corn kernels sizzle in the butter and pop. His breath fogged the glass and the sweat on his nose ran it down. His eyes squinted every time a kernel popped close to his side of the glass box. His father scooped out two paper cups, powdered it with flavours and handed it to him. He ran to the couple sitting on the bench with ice cream cones and handed their order to them. He stood smiling as the girl retrieved cash. She looked at him, slipped an extra note into his hand and said, “Go have some ice cream, popcorn boy!”

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Be pre-warned that this has nothing to do with feminism or being a snob.

How many of you men have been shopping with women – your friends, sister, girlfriend, mother or to purchase gifts for your friend’s female friends? Whether you have or haven’t, not many of you must have noticed the stark contrast between the number of pockets a woman’s attire lacks versus the deluge of pockets in a man’s attire.

While shopping, we women have a lot of options to choose from. Let’s say I want to buy a pair of bottoms. My options begin from jeans, jeggings, shorts, trousers, capris, plazzos, harem pants, jogger pants, mini skirts, midis, maxis and these are just the western wear section, without going to the different fit styles available.

But most of the time the options haven’t really met my expectations in terms of one simple thing – pockets.

Why don’t my clothes have pockets?!

I have had to purchase trousers without pockets because apart from that one lacunae they fit really well. I have erroneously purchased plazzos which only had a pocket seam but no actual pocket! My jeans are such snug fits but with pockets large enough to only accommodate half the size of an average 5 inch screen smartphone.

Our kurtas don’t have pockets, neither do the dresses we wear. Skirts are out of the question when it comes to pockets and even the wallets we have are crammed with things because who’s heard of compartments? It is so inconvenient to be carrying your cash, cards, phone and other essentials in a separate pouch, when men can simply fill it all in their pockets and roam handsfree. On one hand, we women have so many options but barely practical while men seem to be comfortably carrying on with tradition. The most common men’s wallet designs have barely evolved since the 1950’s, it seems.